So, you’re ready to launch your own website, and over the past few days you’ve been digging in deep, doing your research on finding a suitable hosting account.
Everywhere you turn, you keep reading about these things called dedicated servers, but since they seem to cost far more than most other kinds of web hosting, you just can’t see any reason for buying one. After all, isn’t all hosting pretty much the same thing?
Not necessarily. Here’s just a few ways that dedicated servers are different from other kinds of web hosting.
Your own server with no online neighbours
With other plans, such as shared hosting and virtual private servers, you’re essentially housing your website on a physical server that also contains lots of other websites. As we’ll discuss later on in this is article, this is one of the key reasons why those types of hosting are typically cheaper than dedicated servers, though this reduced cost isn’t without its drawbacks.
By having numerous websites all on the same server with a finite amount of storage and bandwidth to go around, if another account on your server hogs up more than your fair share, they could end up eating into yours, ultimately affecting the performance of your site.
With a dedicated server, that’s not the case. As the name suggests, this entails having an entire physical server dedicated to you and you alone, with no hosting neighbours threatening your resource allocations.
Greater power and performance
Partly because you have exclusive access to a dedicated server’s bandwidth, storage and other resources, and partly because these servers typically come with greater amounts of those resources, you’ll have a lot more power behind your website. The result is a site which performs far better than average, with faster loading speeds, less downtime, and an overall more positive user experience.
A good dedicated server site such as discount dedicated servers should be able to provide you with some pointers as to the kind of speed, power and performance you can expect from your new hosting.
Total control and flexibility
If you’ve ever used a shared hosting account before, you’ll know that even the very best ones on the market offer a fairly limited amount of control over what you can do with the physical space you’ve been allocated. Usually, there’ll be no back-end access at all, and you’ll be left with only the option to carry out most of the normal hosting tasks through your cPanel or a similar dashboard.
Even with a good Virtual Private Server -or VPS as they’re commonly known- which does offer a little more access, there’s still some behind-the-scenes stuff that’s out of bounds, meaning you have to pick up the phone to the support team or otherwise simply do without if you want to make any changes to your server space.
This isn’t so with a dedicated server, where you have full root access, along with all the control and flexibility you could hope for in order to manage your server however you like.
Higher costs
As we discussed above, dedicated server hosting generally costs more than shared or VPS hosting. With the latter types of hosting, your web hosting company can spread the cost of managing and maintaining your physical server across many hosting accounts, meaning the more websites that are on the server, the cheaper the cost for all concerned.
With a dedicated server, there’s only one account to one server, meaning things will be more expensive. That said, if you need the kind of increased power, performance and storage space that these servers include, it might well be worth the investment.